Pleas of help from a beaten man

Vaysh

Hullo all. Im new around here as you might be able to tell. A friend advised me here indirectly, he was showing me the various generals for your dominace war, which by the way look absolutly amazing. Anywho, I have recently become interested in the kind of graphic modeling you guys do here, and was wondering where a good place to start and to learn is, im at a bit of a loss after searching for quite some time on my own. All i have come up with is a couple terse messages about going out and buying 500+ dollars worth of software, which is a bit out of my price range. Any advice would be much appreciated!

MoP

For modelling and UV-mapping, Wings 3D is a good place to start. It's free and powerful.

http://www.wings3d.com/

For texture painting and concepting digitally, you could use the GIMP, a free image manipulation program in the style of Photoshop, although maybe not quite as powerful or widely used, it's still very handy and definitely worth the price tag of zero dollars.

http://www.gimp.org/

Those sites should be a good starting point, if you do a bit of Googling and search around similar sites you can probably find some tutorials to point you in the right direction with regards to using those programs.

rawkstar

look into learning editions, imho the one that closest resembles the actual commercial program is XSI i think its www.softimage.com look into it, i think they also have alot of tutorials and videos to get you started, XSI also has game tools for getting your work into games (HL2) and then when you're confident enough or can feel that you can't live without those extra features you could spend $500 on a copy of XSI, i think thats the cheapest coomplete package 3d software you can get, alot of studios are using this right now as well, Valve and Raven do, it is also easy to interface with other programs like maya and zbrush.

You could also try a demo of 3dsmax, I think you can download it from www.autodesk.com 3dsmax is what most of us here use, there are alot of resources around then net where you can find out how to use that, but i think theres a time limit on the 3dsmax demo, like around 30 days or something.

CheapAlert

http://www.blender.org

Blender is nice too. Unique ui takes a few moments to grasp the holds of though, so learn it if you've got the patience. It's hotkey-mouse action focused so keep this in handy.

Also whatever you do, stay away from Milkshape, it'll only make your modeling skills horrible

aesir

learning editions and educationaly priced software should be good enough to get you going.

Vaysh

Thanks a ton guys, ill get to checkin this stuff out now! I appreciate it!